Does weight affect the speed in which a car travels?

Does weight affect the speed in which a car travels? This is the question that puzzled my students over a week ago now. We did an experiment together to find the results.

The first thing we did was weighed the cars using a balance scale to find out the order of weight from lightest to heaviest. We had five cars' weights to determine.





My students' predictions contradicted themselves. When talking about heaviest and lightest they thought the heaviest car would go fastest. But when presented with the actual cars, their predictions varied between the lightest and second to lightest cars.






We recorded the experiment on video. And I would have loved to post it, but the camera in the hands in the first graders resulted in none of the videos actually showing what happened. At the end of the experiment first graders wrote their findings on die cut cars which I hung outside in the hallway around this yellow poster of our experiment.